Exactly. "The Phenomena" is sort of all encompassing. I think that's an interesting thread that's come out recently. Jeremy Corbell advances the idea (not the first to, tho) that things like ghosts, consciousness, the multiverse and ETs are all connected.
In some sense it's easily dismissed as "trivially lumping together all things we don't understand" and calling it "quantum". But on another level there does seem to be overlap: in types of experiences, places they happen, and other things I don't know about.
You can disprove all those things. You just have to find "the real thing" that gives rise to the evidence people talk about, and say, "see it's not X, it's Y". X disproved. But it's a bit dishonest to lump all together. UFOs we have thousands of witnesses, and radar data. Santa we don't have as many witnesses or data.
If we find some Bigfoot like civilization living underground, but that's different to how we think of Bigfoot, we've "explained" Bigfoot and disproven "the wrong version" of Bigfoot.
If Thor lands on Earth and say, "I'm back," but says, "btw my name is "Bor". We've disproved "Thor". If we discover people with some disease which makes them live indoors, drink lymph fluid and live for hundreds of years, we've disproved "vampires" but explained the stories around that.
At the level of speculation we're operating at, these things can be argued both ways. It's not truth that brings you down on one side or another, it's your preference. You're blind to that.
You can't disprove those things. People who believe in ghosts or fairies or angels or gods always beliefs plus claims of evidence. You can disprove some part of the evidence, but they'll always have another bit of evidence where there's not enough data to prove anything one way or the other.
It's the same deal with space aliens visiting Earth. The evidentiary basis for that is no stronger than that for aliens. You're correct that it's preference that leads some to favor aliens over angels, etc. But that's all it is.
so they'll believe them. You can disprove/prove it but you just won't convince them: the certainters on either side. The situation you describe is different to proof, it's more subjective, more to do with resistance.
It's an exact mirror of the practice you see of people who don't want to believe in aliens visiting Earth, inventing new ways to avoid the evidence, whether it's sensor data, witnesses whatever.
"The evidentiary basis for that (fairies and ghosts) is no stronger than that for aliens."
That's an objective sounding statement, but it's just your interpretation and preference. By what standard? If we had hundreds of thousands of people around the world saying they'd been raped / kidnapped by a gang of roaming miscreants dressed up as pirates, and these people had missing time, missing clothes, and then we had the EU maritime agency come out and say, "We've captured what seem to be swarms of pirate ships on radar". Would you still not believe them?
What if they are already in our solar system, hidden, or holed up on some moon somewhere, and they have been for eons. They don't have to come across the galaxies to get here (even if they can, even if that's where they're from). If they're already in our local area you don't need to pretend aliens are physically impossible to arrive. And that possibility seems equal with all others in this speculation, but people rarely consider it, and instead sight the (shortsighted) "physical impossibility" of travel from far away regions in milky way or outside, as "explanation" for why anything we see cannot be aliens. But it's lazy and stupid and doesn't consider this local cluster possibility.
No one's ever "obliged" to do anything, particularly about this, but "decent" is your judgment. What the decent evidence your family loves you? It's not hard data. it's a story you piece together and your existence depends on it. Far less high stakes whether or not aliens are visiting us or not, for you personally, for easier to accept or reject this belief for personal reasons.
I think something else is involved in what makes this hard for people to consider. Not sure what it is. Maybe something like ridiculous anthropocentrist arrogance? "Aliens can't travel here because we don't know how they could."
Anything's possible, but I deny aliens being resident in the solar system is equally possible.
What you're doing is classic "god of the gaps" thinking. Science fiction from 100 years ago imagined aliens on Venus and Mars. From early telescope images, people believed there were canals on Mars. It was all bunk, of course. We have enough data that current live on Mars and Venus looks much less likely. So now you've pushed the little green men back to the parts we can't see as well. That's not because there's any evidence there, but because you have started with a conclusion and you're reasoning toward it.
And what you're doing is denying looking at stuff because it doesn't confirm your biases. There's a bunch of weird things in solar system and mountains of evidence for weirdness on Earth that you'd have question marks over if you were being honest about this.
You may say you want there to be aliens here but you're not acting like you're willing to engage with the evidence about this. You're viewing it through a preconceived idea.
Right there's no smoke gun evidence for solar residence but there's no evidence for them not being there. Circumstantial evidence for proximity to help explain the evidence that they're here on Earth.
"God of the gaps" is a biased and weird way to describe something you do every day. You have a hypothesis, you know there's something wrong, somewhere, but you don't know where it is. So you go looking. Is it in your fridge? No. The closet? No. Under the rug? Backseat of the car? No. Where could it be? Maybe you just imagined the thing. But you were so sure. But there's no evidence....But there is. You sensed something was wrong. You saw the thing yesterday, and now can't see it.
Because you have some Wikipedia page and fancy scary name for some thing that's a normal part of human thinking (and science -- where are all those particles? Let's search in other energy levels and collisions ...) then any thing that looks like that is "little green men" and "bunk"? Come on. By that logic the housemate's lost package, the smell in the living room and the bug you hunt down in your program is bunk.
You're sure there's a bug (might it not just be how you're measuring it?), and you employ a process of elimination. That you employ that process does not make you crazy...but it seems you would look yourself in the mirror and think, "I'm crazy for doing god in the gaps thinking about this bug." Or is that just what you say about others but not yourself?
I just think it's not the type of erroneous thinking you think. It's actually logical. We have a big search space, we have some signals, now go find where they originate. It's a big space, and you don't have access to any of it. If you want to sit there and say, there's nothing there. That's completely illogical. It's not even "unlikely" that there's nothing there. You have signals on Earth, and by your logic of the impossibility of intergalactic travel, the signals are more likely to originate locally.
So... just because you didn't find it on Venus or Mars (so far, but have you been there?), doesn't mean they're not here. There's a lot of places we haven't looked, and they could be there.
You may deny it but that doesn't change one iota of the reality. It's just your belief about it. "God of the gaps" cuts both ways. Every time you see a gap, "You can say, see this is more support to what I'm saying." I can say that. SO can you. It doesn't disprove what you think is unlikely. It doesn't make it more likely. People used to say Marilyn Monroe made a man more of what he was. Cocky men became more cocky in her presence. Timid men more timid. Maybe the gaps show us what we really think, not what's really there? It doesn't show you anything. It's not "god of the gaps" it's unknown in the gaps.
Only thing it shows is we're both willing to fill in the gaps with certainty. You're certain they're not in the solar system. Another idea that supports the notion that aliens visiting Earth is more likely than without them being in the solar system? You deny it. To support your pre-existing belief? Of course not. Simple because the evidence guides you toward that in your unbiased appraisal of it. Come on... You're blind to the interpretive nature of your conclusions, and still hide that in the perception that the "sensible majority consensus" aligns with your view. But that very conservatism makes you an unreliable speaker about these mysteries. What value can you add if you're not willing to engage with the gaps?
"Ah, it's a big black unknown. Leave it alone. Nothing to see there."
You're saying it's all bunk, is the bunk. Because you don't know. Have you searched every crevice of the solar system to prove there's no life there? That someone had a story that was a wrong interpretation of the data, but if true supports a 'they're here' hypothesis, does not disprove that hypothesis if their interpretation is wrong.
I'd say we don't have nearly enough data to rule it out. 'Much less likely' compared to a strawman? Still can be very likely.
You've kept the little green men out of your garden because it doesn't make sense to you that they're here. Or you felt in the past it's just too much fun for you to argue with those that believe. And you think the time is still here when denying evidence of this stuff still looks rational. But that time has passed. It now looks crazy to say the evidence leads you to stretch denials into invoking a certainty of impossibility in the face of ambiguity and lots of signal.
What you're ignoring is that "signal" is in the interpretation. You're blind to that. You can crank up data, and wind down your "signal" to confirm your existing biases. In fact that's what you need to do to preserve your "no unexplained" belief system. And that's what you see, people reaching for every more crazy explanations to pretend they didn't see what they saw: "the pilots hallucinated, and the battlegroup sensors all hallucinated, at the same time, repeatedly, over a few months"
I like the liminal theory but this isn't the same thing.
Nah. As I mentioned, I believe alien life is very likely to exist somewhere in the universe. I'd be fucking thrilled if it were to drop by for a visit. Fairies and wizards and dragons and whatnot would be cool too. But that doesn't prevent me from seeing that all of these have been on the margins for a long time, and continue to be on the margins despite the massive increase in our ability to document things over the last couple centuries.
That part of you wants to believe in alien visitors, seems to be independent of the priors you have (about the impossibility of this) that filters your interpretation of the data. I think that's normal. People's ideas do not need to be self-consistent and can "contain multitudes".
To extend the pirate rapists example from my other answer. Maybe you'd never known a pirate that had raped a person, but I think if you knew someone who told you that story, and you'd heard other people had similar experiences, you'd certainly believe them.
Or maybe not pirates but Trump supporters. Or whatever group fit your priors for likely/payoff for you to do this. So the "aliens are not a smart possibility" here is just an interpretation skewed by the way you want to read signal in the evidence.
It's equal that we can look at the same things and come to different conclusions. That's diversity of opinion and experience. But maybe you haven't even looked at the same things. Certainly we look at them in different ways.
I believe aliens are here. But I'm not saying this Navy evidence points to that definitely. I'm saying it doesn't rule it out. It's smart to keep open to it. I'd say the preponderance of witness evidence over decades without a doubt points to that they are here. Does this evidence prove it? No to me. But I know it. It's what I believe based on my own knowledge and experiences.
You have a different belief is normal. I don't think either of us can claim to be "right" on this topic re evidence (tho about the solar system, what do you think about those weird obelisks? structures on the moon? NASA's history of censoring space photos? Lights on Ceres, on Phobos, on Luna?)
In one view, the lack of solid widely accepted data is why there's so much "meat" to be argued about, but actually I don't think that's the meat, that's just reaching the ground consensus that people will reach different conclusions and I think as long as they do so with an open mind to the evidence that's valid.
I do think you have to admit that what you say about it comes not from evidence, but from your interpretation of it. It's not proven either way, it's just your belief that it's so. And that's all that matters so far right.
I don't think those papers mean what you think they mean. I could be wrong, I'm not perception studies expert, but the first one seems to say that binocular parallax (signals from looking with two eyes) are relatively reliable, especially in daylight conditions (the case you critique). Second two seems to talk about how high up in the sky something is as being the biggest distortion in estimating distance. Also the last one involved bizarre artificial conditions of looking through light bending prisms. Our eyes are definitely unreliable (to a certain extent), you have a blindspot in the middle of your vision in both eyes (retinal optic nerve spot) but you nearly never see it because your brain can interpolate. But I think judging something like this, in the well lit conditions described, I think you're exaggerating the difficulty. And I dislike that because it seems dishonest, and cruel to witnesses. It's a form of gaslighting. You have people (Navy pilots, civilians) coming forward and seeing things, and then everyone else wants to say, "Are you sure you saw that?" I get it, because you didn't see it, so it's natural to doubt. But you will walk across the street today, and reach down and pick up a coin, and I'll stop you and say, are you sure those cars are that far away, are you sure you see the coin. Don't cross the street, don't touch that coin. Maybe it's a hallucination. Maybe it's a bomb. Maybe it's a snake. Of course I wouldn't do that. That would be crazy. People casting doubt should doubt their own doubt too. It shouldn't be natural to doubt when so many people say the same thing.
That's so cool. The few minutes later is weird. Maybe it was something invisible nearby, or maybe the sound traveled to you, but a few minutes 180s*330m/s would be around 59Km away. If it was that far in the atmosphere it would have been huge, and maybe not even made a sound because the air would have been pretty thin that far away.
I hear that the crashes were shoot-downs or Trojan horse style gifts designed to lure us into co-operation with ETs who sly gave us tech far too advanced for us to figure out, then promised to slowly teach us how some of it works in exchange for whatever cooperation. There's lots of narrative and can be argued both ways, but without people seeing some hard data they believe, probably we'll have zero consensus.
I looked at the Tic Tac explanation in that article (section 2.4.3); I assert it's ... weak.
The object is tracking left with respect to the aircraft, as seen by the increasing left azimuth reported from the sensor. However, that azimuth is reported in units of whole degrees, with the sensor field-of-view being 0.7 degrees at 1x zoom or 0.35 degrees at 2x zoom.
The rate of azimuth change is about 0.3 degrees per second based on some simple stopwatch measurements.
In other words, if the sensor loses lock and ceases to track the target, you would expect the object to appear to accelerate left out of frame. At the 2x zoom, the angular distance across half the field-of-view (i.e. from the middle to the left edge) is 0.175 degrees; so you'd absolutely it to disappear in ~0.5 seconds.
You can see some "bobbling" of the lock as the operator switches between zoom levels in the video, and indeed the apparent sudden movement of the object occurs immediately after one increase in zoom level.
The data presented is equally consistent with this theory, but the article doesn't address that possibility at all - instead assuming that the explanation can only be due to kinematics of the object.
I also checked on the journal that published this analysis; it turns out that the principle author of the article is also the editor-in-chief of the journal... also the publisher of the journal (MDPI) has been on-and-off the lists of predatory journal publishers for some years.
That's good analysis. But by your standard of equally consistent your analysis also must be judged as weak. I don't think either theory are weak. They're just theories consistent with the evidence. So that's kind of strong.
Also I agree with you on the journal. Probably not the best example. I'd just rather people try to analyze than dismiss it irrationally so even a dodgy journal, with a comprehensive analysis is better. I don't think we should "default to trust" something just because it's in a journal. Likewise no default to distrust.
None of the radar data released recently about Omaha shows extraordinary speeds or Gs. So maybe nothing in the hard data shows any smoking gun evidence of super speeds. That might be deliberate by the Navy but such speculation doesn't change facts we have.
I dislike the "smearing of witnesses" and default to "explained" attitude brought to this, which is interesting and justifies curiosity. Witnesses are unreliable but Navy aviators are trained witnesses, experts in the domain of estimating speed, distance, aircraft type, maneuvering - and you have a handful of them who have come forward saying they saw dozens of these things over days. And people want to just pretend the Navy doesn't know the difference between a plane and a bird, or doesn't know how to read their sensors or calibrate them to remove artefacts.
I'm not saying you're disputing there is a real object detected, but some people say it's a fly on the glass or something ridiculous. I dislike these contemptuous dismissals of trained observers and supposedly best-in-class top-secret sensors. So I want to see more analysis and curious discussion ... less arrogant dismissal.
Even the points that are not in contention are extraordinary: no control surface, no heat signature, no propulsion signature, extended time-on-station, active jamming, foreknowledge of CAP point, apparent thermoptic/radar cloaking (or superspeed) re it can vanish and appear almost instantly.
They say the things dropped from space to sea-level in a second. That's amazing. I think a valid alternative is that they were able to hack/delude the radar into thinking they just appeared. Just like how they disappeared. It's seems possible a smooth white object could be covered in some sort of optical/thermal/radar distorting materials, that could make it vanish to sensors even if it was still there. That's not the explanation I believe, but I think it's a valid alternative in light of a lack of discriminating evidence.
I don't have any explanations for the violation of aerodynamics, lack of heat, wake, or extended "battery life". I would sure love to know how it did that. That's extraordinary. Until proven otherwise. I think you can question the data a bit, and the witnesses a lot, but when you start reaching hard to twist everything into an "explained away" narrative, you're missing the signal that's there. And it seems crazy, to do mental gymnastics that requires a coincidence of all the failures, repeated, over time: the Pentagon is lying or doesn't know it's a bird, or a stick of gum on the sensor, the aviators are hallucination, the sensors (across the entire battle group) are malfunctioning at the same time and erroneously reporting internally-consistent tracks, that then coincide with positions seen by aviators visually, this didn't just happen as a glitch in one moment, but consistently, over days, and months (according to some people). As these strange skythings have also happened to thousands of civilians and other servicepeople around the world over decades. It's crazy to paint it as "a coincidence of errors and hallucinations". I'm not saying anyone who says that is crazy, just the idea itself, because I guess to them it seems crazy to say it's aliens.
Maybe this thing is all a weird and elaborate way for the US govt to do a big reveal of some new exotic drone tech it has and make sure everyone in the world is watching. Could be truth of it, but I think the mileage attainable from running with the "we don't know / mystery" narrative is probably higher than tying it all up in a neat little bow right now. I don't think any of this will answer the question of aliens/not - it's entirely possible to be having a dealing with aliens in secret, and then do this "semi-public" reveal in parallel and keep the two things isolated, maybe deliberately, maybe to plunge the secret alien connection further into the depths of secrecy. I think the key thing is the big reveal is about control. Seems various factions have been coming forward over time to leak things out, now someone needs to get out in front of this, unified front, unified messaging, and recapture control of the narrative.
Extraordinary until proven otherwise. Extraordinary conservatism results in extraordinary ignorance.
I know you've taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It's the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it's threatening the game. But really what it's threatening is their livelihoods, it's threatening their jobs, it's threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it's the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their hands on the switch. They go bat shit crazy.
-- John Henry, Moneyball
What’s most frustrating about the U.F.O.s story is that it obscures the fact that scientists like me and my colleagues are on the threshold of gathering data that may be relevant to the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
-- This dude, real life
Translation: PWEASE don't take mah funding because ahm noloonger sexy enough
I think his fear is overblown. There's room for both. RT arrays are another form of sensor. Money will not dry up. Surprises me tho that if objects are ETs no RT array data has leaked. Super coverup? No data?
Common-sense objections arguable from both sides. Why no White House Lawn big reveal? Maybe they big-revealed in People's Park in Shanghai...or Red Square in Moscow, or Phoenix, AZ. Or Prime Directive. Why anyhow would they go through our government, when we're, as "Joe Rogan" says, "chimps with nukes", why would "elected officials" mean anything to them?
The woo-fringe likes to say the "benevolent ETs" are "seeding out consciousness" for eventual "mass disclosure" and "human evolution". What if it's more like there's no open contact because that's not their point, they get seen sometimes because it's not that important (we can't do shit anyway), and we're actually an agricultural product or a science experiment (to them, at least)? What if the government "knew" that. They'd never fucking say it. What a big fucking let down and popping the bubble of our "great civilization" and our "fantastic fucking egos". No one in power is going to "spill the beans" on the "real inside track" of people with more power than them. The only chance they got is to cling to the mystery, like the priest caste of old (that Jesus beat the shit out of in the temple, and accused of hypocrisy), and get power by being the "mediators" to real power.
Or what if it all happened like the SSP-whistleblowers want you to believe. Vatican had contact in the past. Nazi Germany built a craft through ET telepathic instructions to the Vrill society. Co-opted by Hitler. Secret Antarctic base. Operation Highjump. Operation Paperclip. Breakaway civilizations. Mars Germans. CIA Dark Fleet. Secret space program. We have anti-gravity craft and age-regression and time-travel tech hewn from the reversed-engineered carcasses of ET trojan horses, developed in collusion with aliens in exchange for "treaties" for them to continue their "shady dealings" on Earth. A massive secret society. We've already colonized the solar system. Earth is a backwater of humanity that has already reached the stars. Why not clue us in?
Aliens, Burke: Okay, look. What if that ship didn't even exist, huh? Did you ever think about that? I didn't know! So now, if I went in and made a major security issue out of it, everybody steps in. Administration steps in, and there are no exclusive rights for anybody; nobody wins. So I made a decision and it was... wrong. It was a bad call, Ripley. It was a bad call.
Why not clue us in? Why keep Earth in the dark? It's easier to control. Why surrender your corporate monopoly on interstellar trade? Why does the CIA have security clearances? Why does DoD (etc) keep information in siloed SAPs? Protects their secrets. Protects their advantage. Why read in the whole of the Earth population? No fucking way. No way would we risk out bottom line. Simple corporate economics. Fuck you, Earth. We don't care about telling you the truth. We only care how we can squeeze every goddamned dollar out of every goddamned opportunity. Fuck humanity. It's all about the Benjamins.
Why not like that? So many other things are. Even if "chimps with nukes" got anti-grav tech and codes for the cosmic intergalactic portals so we can jump to other stars, why would you assume we'd be operating in a way that was more advanced, more enlightened, less corrupt, less greedy, than we do in a place like Burma? in HK? In anyway there's a buck to be made, and laws not yet made.
The truth is a sad reflection of our worst characteristics. And the finger of blame can be pointed squarely back at the government and the big corporates in secret advanced tech who collude with them. That truth is never coming out. Because there's "too much to lose". Fuck the public. The only thing that matters is the "people who matter."
This is all a controlled narrative. You'll never get the truth.
The best we're gonna get a rained-down, rosey-glassed, disinformed, fantasy. And that's all we'll ever be trusted with. Sad, sad, sad, sad sad. But what can you expect from humanity? Not a fucking iota more, that's for sure.
Sorry for the defeatist cynicism: hope you take it as a motivator: don't accept the story you get fed. Find a way to work it out for yourself. Whatever it takes. It's worth it.
